Last August, President Bush attended an exclusive, high-priced fundraiser for New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici.  Local activists opposed to the president’s policies were, of course, not invited.  To let the president know that not everyone agreed with him, they planned to stand along his motorcade route holding up signs expressing their views, especially their opposition to the war in Iraq.

The peaceful demonstrators’ attempt at free speech was quickly squashed when police officers forced them to stay at least 150 yards away from the motorcade route, walling them off by placing numerous police cars and officers on horseback between the protesters and the president.  Meanwhile, a group of Bush supporters was allowed to stand right along the motorcade route, where their “God Bless George Bush!  We pray for you!” sign was in plain view of both Bush and the journalists accompanying him.

This isn’t the first time law enforcement officers have tried to squelch dissenters in President Bush’s presence. In 2004, Jeffrey and Nicole Rank were arrested for peacefully attending one of the president’s speeches while wearing t-shirts bearing the international “no” symbol superimposed over the word “Bush.”  The Ranks sued and ultimately received an $80,000 settlement from the White House—a win for free speech after a fight that should never have been necessary in a free society.

And in 2005, Leslie Weise and Alex Young were ejected from another of the president’s speeches because of a bumper sticker on their car that read “No More Blood for Oil.”  Their lawsuit is still pending.  

Now, the ACLU has filed a complaint in federal court on behalf of six of the peaceful protesters in New Mexico who were banned from the view of the president.  It is our hope that the lawsuit will prove once and for all that incidents such as these are unconstitutional.

These incidents of censorship appear to be dictated by White House policy.  The official Presidential Advance Manual recommends that someone working on the ground where the president is to make an appearance “ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.”  It advocates the formation of “rally squads” of sign-wielding supporters that can “use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.”  It also suggests that the rally squads “lead supportive chants to drown out the protesters (USA!  USA!  USA!).”  

Lest it be thought that only Republican administrations engage in this type of behavior, it is worth pointing out that the Clinton administration’s Advance Manual also suggested that supporters could “be encouraged to wave supporting placards in front of opposing ones.”  In fact, the ACLU supported a lawsuit against a government policy that prohibited people from demonstrating along the route of Clinton’s presidential inauguration parade.

It’s easy to see why presidents would want to be pictured surrounded by adoring supporters. After all, the true audience for a presidential appearance is usually not those who attend in person, but the potential millions who will catch a glimpse on the evening news.  Few may hear the words the president speaks, but many will see the images filmed that day.

But the desire to look good does not justify treating members of the public like extras in a campaign commercial rather than citizens with a protected constitutional right to engage in speech of their own.  Shielding the president from all criticism is an unsound and undemocratic policy that violates the Constitution.  The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.”  This guarantee is grounded in the idea that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained almost 90 years ago, “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”  

The right to free speech is meaningless when the government is permitted to do an end run around the First Amendment by relegating those who want to exercise it to remote locations where no one will hear them.  Communication requires both a speaker and a listener.  Just as it is censorship to prohibit speech entirely, it is censorship to place individuals where they can speak all they want with no chance of being heard.

Take Action

You should consider joining the ACLU, or at least donating to help them with the good works they are doing to protect all of our civil liberties.

About the author

Catherine Crump works at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to safeguard the right to engage in political dissent. Catherine’s project seeks to protect the First Amendment rights of government whistle blowers and political protesters. She counsels and supports government employees who wish to come forward with information about shortcomings in the government’s national security strategy. She also works with political protesters who are critical of government and have been forced to protest in relatively remote locations because of their viewpoint.
 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted at The Huffington Post, and The Daily Kos. Her bio is from Equal Justice Works

Verizon’s notion of “progress” may not agree with your notion of free speech

Over the last several weeks we learned that the nation’s two largest telecommunications firms want to get into the business of censorship as well — blocking the free flow of information over phones and the Internet.

We saw an unsettling example of just how bad this can get last week. Verizon Wireless blocked text messages that national pro-choice group NARAL wanted to send to their members. That they reversed the decision after the censorship was exposed should offer little comfort.

While they may have scrambled to fix one “dusty policy” and let these messages through, we can see in the details of this and other episodes a worrisome pattern of abuse. And it’s not just at Verizon. Over the weekend, the technophiles at Slashdot exposed what many of us failed to read in the fine print of our AT&T customer agreements.

Censorship Is in the Details

Deep in its “terms of service” for high-speed services AT&T had buried this tidbit: The phone company may “immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your service … without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.”

We have since sifted the agreements of other access providers and found even more explicit language over at Verizon: The company “reserves the right and sole discretion to change, limit, terminate, modify at any time, temporarily or permanently cease to provide the Service or any part thereof to any user or group of users, without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.”

You got that?

You’re Busted!

These multi-billion dollar network giants are telling their Internet and cell phone customers this: If you want “your world delivered,” you better play nice with the phone companies.

That means no speaking out of turn against AT&T and Verizon’s slow services, high prices or anti-competitive practices.

An Editorial cartoon by Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News. Visit his website at http://www.adamzyglis.com/

Speak out for Net Neutrality and you could find your self on the wrong side of the digital divide. Losing an Internet connection would hit especially hard those millions of Americans in markets where the phone company is the only Internet service in town.

It gets weirder. Listed among AT&T’s “prohibited activities” are “creating or attempts to utilize a domain or domain name that is defamatory, fraudulent, indecent, offensive, deceptive, threatening, abusive, harassing, or which damages the name or reputation of AT&T.” [my emphasis]

This seems to take AT&T’s content policing one further. It is not enough that you can be disconnected for conduct that damages the reputation of AT&T, but you can lose your feed for simply visiting a Web site — or “domain” — that does the same.

Guess what? You’re doing that right now.

Free Speech Everywhere

Perhaps you think we’re making much out of nothing — that such fine print is created by lawyers to cover a company’s but in rare, worst case scenarios.

Try thinking about it this way: If a phone company can’t tell you what to say on a phone call, then it shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say in a text message, an e-mail, a blog or anywhere else. Speech should be free wherever it occurs – on the Internet, over cell phones, on the streets – everywhere. And it should be protected.

More and more of our communications occur in digital formats. It’s time Americans safeguarded free speech in this new media with the passion that we protect it in old. A good place to start is with the two companies that control Internet and cell phone access for more than 120 million Americans.

My organization Free Press has called on Congress to convene hearings that address phone company censorship policies. You can support this effort by writing your member of Congress and urging them to stand with the rest of us and investigate this abuse.

The biggest threat to free speech in America is public complacency. We must have this discussion about our democratic rights while we still can.

Phone lobbyists exert immense power over both Democrats and Republicans in the halls of Washington. As an alternative to opening their doors wide to AT&T and Verizon lobbyists, the least our elected officials could do for us is keep new communications open for everyone.

About Free Press

Free Press is a national nonpartisan organization working to increase informed public participation in crucial media policy debates, and to generate policies that will produce a more competitive and public interest-oriented media system with a strong nonprofit and noncommercial sector.

About Timothy Karr

Timothy Karr is Campaign Director at Free Press. He manages both the SavetheInternet.com and StopBigMedia.com Coalition campaigns, in addition to his work on fake news and propaganda, and journalism in crisis. Prior to Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time Inc., New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press.

While America sleeps in the illusion of freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution, America’s gatekeepers (in the form of the the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Oval Office and even our Congress, all of whom have failed miserably at controlling illegal immigration in the USA) are hard at work finding new, creative, under-the-radar ways to press down ever harder that growing thumb of “security” on the average American citizen.

Too many Americans, asleep at the wheel in their sheltered cocoons of ambivalence, inattentiveness and a faulty assumption that government is always working in their best interest, keep hitting that snooze button as, one by one, their rights are revoked and their private lives invaded by bureaucratic snooping.

Wake up, America. Time to smell the coffee. It’s getting bitter.

As I browsed the web these past few weeks, cruising for news that comes from anywhere, everywhere but Fox and its growing ilk, or corporately directed newscasts, I’ve stumbled across quite a few interesting but troubling stories.

The first story that jumps to mind concerns travel beyond U.S. borders, and the apparent governmental monitoring of all the things we bring aboard a plane: the titles of the book(s) we carry, the kinds of medications we pack, our destinations and frequency of travel, who we travel with and how often we share the same flights (we don’t have to be seat mates, just on the same flights). Snoopy. Spooky.

This data, information we aren’t even aware is being collected, is, according to reports stockpiled for FIFTEEN YEARS by some obscure governmental process kept out of the public eye. Just collecting and collating that data seems to ensure lifetime job security for quite a few people.

The Automated Targetting System (ATS, another of the government’s favored three-letter acronyms) has its eye on you, on your cruise plans, your honeymoon in Venice, your theater trip to London, your trip-of-a-lifetime African safari, that jaunt across the border to Montreal or Vancouver, or that otherwise simple business trip to China or France.

In a North Carolina News Observer article, U.S. Monitors Americans’ Travel (9/22/07), under the guise of helping “border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people,” the government is calculating the finite details of your travels almost to the quality and quantity of the air you breathe en route. ATS has been in place for more than a decade, but in 2002 the monitored skyrocketed. They weren’t very effective in 2001.

In the weeks after Sept. 11, no one in Dallas, Texas, even opened my luggage at customs or bothered to read my customs declaration. Peruvian agents took my friend’s tiny bottle of Sugar Cane rum made in the Amazon jungle before we ever boarded a much delayed flight home, and Peruvian and American agents on either end of our flight both missed the 24 inch long, boldly painted, intricately carved blow gun and the kapok tipped arrows (which look like oversized Q-tips) I bought from a Yagua tribesman somewhere in the jungle. My friend’s was even bigger, brighter and bolder. They never looked at hers either. Or the tribal masks we brought home with us. Our carefully packed souvenirs traveled unencumbered and unquestioned for 6,000 miles. We, the overweight, out-of-breath, exhilarated, and exhausted probably looked too “American tourist” to be of concern. Uh-oh. profiling.

But in fact, the time it takes to monitor the members of a senior center’s art tour bound for Holland would be better spent focusing on other security triggers. Unless there are deeper, darker motives for setting this type of surveillance in place, motives that might include an internal expansion of the program. That dovetails neatly with the ongoing assault on civil liberties.

“Civil liberties advocates say the information preserved raises alarms about the government’s ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records are kept are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting errors, activists said.”

– News Observer NC (9/22/07)

ATS administrators now confronted with public ire and activist scrutiny are backpedaling the details of who, what and where they are directing their observations, which means only that after five years of information gathering their dirty little secrets are under a public microscope now. Does that mean the same surveillance is being applied to domestic travel and we just don’t know the depth of that monitoring yet?

Funny, but I didn’t think my copy of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, Plato’s The Myth of the Caves, the notes in my journal on the refurbished “architecture as art” of bus stations in New England, or my manuscript on Dementia and caregiving merited that kind of scrutiny.

Are they Zeroxing my letters too? Photocopying my Bad Monkey Bush pin or my precious bright blue Don’t Buy War Toys button? My Friend of Dunbar Cave (ohmygod she might be an Al Gore earth-centric environmentalist!) button? Are they counting the number of high blood pressure pills in my cosmetic bag? Checking the color of my lipstick? The brand of shampoo I use? The chemical content of my 3 oz. ‘For Color Treated Hair’ conditioner? Maybe they need to do a strand test to make sure my Hibiscus Revlon Hydrience hair dye doesn’t pose a toxic threat at 35,000 feet? Somehow, I didn’t think the battered, worn-out snow proof baggage I use on my semi-annual commute to a northern college for a labor-intensive week of writing workshops was all that noteworthy.

Oh, wait! I do go to a very progressive, non-traditional, liberal, free-thinking, outside-the-box school near the permeable Canadian border. The one was anti-war in the 60s, gay pride conscious in the 70s, environmentally conscious in the 80s, pro-civil union in the 90s and vegetarian years before it was fashionable.

Maybe my enrollment there makes me, with my ’slightly the worse for wear’ 57-year-old body, asthma, allergies, bad back, and hypertension a dangerous person; after all, my brain still works and I exercise it regularly by reading, asking questions and paying attention. Maybe, though, I won’t be allowed to fly because I have the ability to get to my gate on time and read the seat numbers without assistance.

On a deeper, more serious level, this kind of governmental scrutiny is akin to intellectual rape, a violation of personal privacy, an intrusion taken to the extreme that should not be tolerated by any of us. And yes, I am taking it personally. So should all of you.

There’s more, though. I all but laughed at the lunatic concept presented in this policy that says two people traveling together once is coincidence; two people traveling on the same flight twice constitutes a “relationship” and such relationships raise questions. Okay, commuters. Each needs a separate flight between JFK and DC, or Boston and New York, or San Francisco to LA for those Monday through Friday commutes to escape the “pairing.” Heaven forbid you should be on the same flight with the same group of people more than once. Husbands and wives — start counting the vacations you take together. You seniors from the local COA running off to Vegas and the slot machines a couple of times a year — you are a conspiracy in the making. You may end up on a no fly list. “What plays in Vegas” may stay in Vegas, but how you get there could become a matter of public record for Homeland Security.

Officials quoted in these stories say that such tracking led in part to the connections of the 9-11 terrorists. Threads in a global terrorist conspiracy. But billions of records are being collected, uploaded and filed into semi-obscurity in a governmental cyber warehouse of infinite proportions.

Remember the visual punch (photo, above) of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark? The most powerful religious artifact in the world, packed in a wooden crate, rolling down a city of floor to ceiling crates in a governmental warehouse. The new ATS warehouse is configured in cyberspace, but our records are all alive and well there. Somewhere.
The majority of these records reflect ordinary people, with ordinary lives: your daughter and her friends flying off to college, grandma’s winter in Florida, dad’s monthly meetings in Chicago, a young couple’s romantic honeymoon in Venice, the annual family trip to Disneyland. The majority of these records reflect ordinary people, whose expectations as defined by the Bill of Rights are being undermined by a growing number of invasive, intrusive forays into their personal lives.

Yes, there is a pattern and profile to terrorism, but it is not in the luggage, the handbags, the briefcases, the journals, or the books of the average American traveler.

What gets targeted? Well, the usual and obvious suspects: J.D. Salinger, J.K. Rowling. John Steinbeck. Mark Twain. Robert Cormier. And writers such as Maya Angelou – someone out there wants her “Caged Bird” silenced forever. Even revered children’s authors including Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle and Judy Blume (whose penned scripted three of the top one hundred books).

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…

“If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

— On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

The Office for Intellectual Freedom tracks challenges to this literary aspect of our Civil Liberties, and while it currently updating totals from its 2000-2005 records, it offers some surprising and under-reported statistics for the ten year period that covered the 1990’s.

OIF recorded at least 6,364 challenges to shelved books available in America’s schools and libraries. The number of challenges and the number of reasons for those challenges do not match, because works are often challenged on more than one ground. Here’s a rundown of those objections:

• 1,607 were challenges to “sexually explicit” material ;
• 1,427 to material considered to use “offensive language”;
• 1,256 to material considered “unsuited to age group”;
• 842 to material with an “occult theme or promoting the occult or Satanism”;
• 737 to material considered to be “violent”;
• 515 to material with a homosexual theme or “promoting homosexuality”;
• 419 to material “promoting a religious viewpoint.”

Other reasons for challenges included “nudity,” “racism,” “sex education” and “anti-family”. Seventy-one percent of the challenges were to material in schools or school libraries. Another twenty-four percent were to material in public libraries . Sixty percent of the challenges were brought by parents, fifteen percent by patrons, and nine percent by administrators.

One hundred titles are listed here (I’ve read 52), the top 100 books challenged in the decade from 1990-2000 as listed by the Office for Intellectual Freedom.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Information and statistics courtesy of the Office for Intellectual Freedom

For more on banned books week see our special Banned Books Week Section

Just in time for banned books week I have an update on the boycott I called for last November of the Customs House Museum. I became offended when Executive Director Ned Couch used his personal judgment that an artist’s exhibit might offend some museum patrons as justification for requiring the artist to remove portions of it, all done in the name of protecting community sensibilities.

These same justifications have been used throughout history to justify the suppression of peoples freedom of speech, press, religion, and association. Our founding fathers found this so reprehensible that they specifically prohibited the government of this country from engaging in those very actives in the very first amendment to our Constitution. The only requirement for censorship is that someone in a position of power disagrees with something someone else was doing, then uses their position and authority to stop them, and that the public acquiesce.

The executive director at the time, Ned Couch, has announced he is stepping down. So today I am ending the boycott called 10 months ago. Don’t get me wrong; I seriously doubt that my boycott is behind his imminent departure, but in the aftermath of his censorship I asked that he leave, and leave he has. You take your victories where you can find them.

The primary result of all this is that you can expect to see greater and more detailed coverage of future Museum events, exhibitions, news, and activities very soon on Clarksville Online!

To learn more

Check out While America Sleeps: Censorship masked as ‘Chapel Library Project’, APSU screens Hollywood Librarian, and our upcoming articles, Banned Books: Have you read one? and Book Burning: Fueling flames of censorship.

While America Sleeps is “an occasional column” and commentary on the state of Civil Liberties in America.

I ‘ve been following the saga of the removal, regulation and control of access to books by people in prison. Religiously oriented books in particular.

I read with great interest a New York Times commentary by Laurie Goodstein on the systematic purging of books on faith from prison bookshelves by chaplains under the Standardized Chapel Library Project. Those same chaplains are now being asked to review tome by tome any and every requested book before it “might” be returned to the shelves for access by inmates. As if chaplains have nothing else to do but serve as literary screeners (a.k.a. censors) for the prison system.

According to Goodstein, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said her agency was responding to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department that recommended a course of action for prisons to keep them from becoming:

“… recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.

“Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

– Laurie Goodstein, NYT (9/10/07)

The banned books ripped from prison libraries included nine works by acclaimed author C.S. Lewis, creator of the Chronicles of Narnia series, an array of Islamic and other non-Christian texts, a high number of Jewish faith-based texts, but none by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles, or the influential Pastor Robert H. Schuller.

Prison chaplains routinely review incoming texts for violence but have questioned both the extensive removal of religiously-oriented books that has left many bookshelves almost bare. Chaplains have been burdened with the complex and time-consuming task of reading and reviewing requested books prior to making them available to prisoners.

“There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

– Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship

The government maintained that the new rules don’t entirely clear the shelves of prison chapel libraries, and a U.S. Attorney Brian Feldman told U.S. District Court Laura Taylor Swain that prison libraries limited the number of book for each religion under the new rules, and that officials would could increase the numbers “after choosing a new list of permitted books.” (USA Today/AP)

The target in this post 9-11 mindset is obviously Islamic-oriented studies and potential links to terrorism, as admitted by Ms. Billingsley. But how long will it be before this extremist action that violates the freedom of religion, the right to pursue religious study regardless of denomination is vectored into other venues: our libraries, our schools?

This action is not just about books in prisons with captive audiences. It’s much bigger than that.

This purge of the tools of knowledge recalls the outrage that erupted several years ago when our government walked over the Bill of Rights in its attempt to access and track records of the library books we read. Librarians were irate, the half of America that stayed awake was outraged, and the half of America still asleep didn’t seem to know or care. All it did for me was make me immediately find the most outrageous books on the shelves and check them out. This kind of intrusive monitoring is a precursor to expansive censorship and worse, and leaves us no better off than the countries we criticize for their lack of “democracy” and democratic principles.

I view the Chapel Library Project (the prison book bill, as I call it) as another example of our government’s “guerrilla warfare” on the Bill of Rights.

As for me, if someone or some agency bans a book, I will go out of my way to read it just to find out what it is they don’t want me to know. I might not have been interested in it before, but they have now peaked my curiosity. Hey, you three-letter agency guys and gals: there’s a lesson in there — the same one Congress got a dose of by censuring MoveOn.Org last week.

Lessons to be learned …

In the famous H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine, his Time Traveler whirls into a future in which the surface dwellers have devolved into a simple, illiterate people, the Eloi, with a sub culture of Morlocks who control, prey upon and cannibalize them. No rights or liberties. Just a nurtured existence at the whim and convenience of the powerful. It was allowed to happen to the extreme, over time, by those who did not pay attention. Predator and Prey.

“The Utopian existence of the Eloi turns out to be deceptive. The Traveler soon discovers that the class structure of his own time has in fact persisted, and the human race has diverged into two branches. The wealthy, leisure classes appear to have devolved into the ineffectual, not very bright Eloi he has already seen; but the down-trodden working classes have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids resembling human spiders, who toil underground maintaining the machinery that keep the Eloi – their flocks – docile and plentiful. Both species, having adapted to their routines, are of distinctly sub-human intelligence.”

– Wikipedia

In the film version, Wells’ Time Traveler (Rod Taylor, right, in the 1960 film version) is confronted with the absence of information: no media, no awareness, just shelves of books that crumble to the touch and an odd holographic record of the decline of intellectual civilization. The Time Traveler returns home, collects a few items, including three books, and returns to this horrifying future with the implication of effecting change. Which books did he bring? Which would you choose for such a journey? Will they still be around when you need them?

Examining the once tightly packed shelf, the Time Traveler’s friends try to learn which books journeyed into the future.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For those interested in the issue of censorship and the banning of books, Austin Peay State University is among 87 U.S. and Canadian locations that will screen the documentary, The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film. The film can be seen on Sunday, September 30, at 6 p.m. and Monday, October 1, at 4 p.m. at the Morgan University Center (Room 303). The screening coincides with the celebration of Banned Books Week and include scenes of the 1930s burning of John Steinbeck’s books, discussion of the Patriot Act and an interview with acclaimed author Ray Bradbury.

All censorship ever does is create a firestorm of opposition, and a renewed interest in the material being banned. So why did the Customs House Museum think they would be an exception to this rule? Any censorship raises people’s hackles. Intellectually we know that allowing it to pass uncommented erodes our freedoms much more rapidly than by any other means.

Critics cry out that you can not desecrate the American flag. But it is perfectly ok for politicians to wrap themselves in the flag and use it to justify abhorrent actions. It is also considered ok for musicians to wear the flag as an item of their clothing. How many flag belt buckles have I seen proudly shown off over the years? How many pickup trucks and cars have I seen driving around town using the flag as a tawdry decoration? All those uses of the flag are fine, but don’t you dare use a flag in any way that actually makes a point!

Where one person sees desecration, another sees artistic interpretation and inspiration. Lets take a moment to read the words that the artist printed on the flag. “Waste creates jobs. Waste is good for the economy”; “Poor people are obese because they eat poorly”; “More Consumption, More Waste, More Jobs, More Economic Stimulation, More Consumption, More Destruction, More Jobs, More Economic Stimulation”. Know what he’s right. We are a consumer society for good or ill. We as a society place more emphasis on buying and owning, than on the community good. We can disagree with him all we want on how he made his point, but we can’t disagree that he has the right to make it.

Ned Couch the executive director of the Customs House Museum has supposedly in the name of protecting community sensibilities used his personal judgement that this exhibit might offend Museum patrons as justification for requiring the artist to remove portions of it. In doing so he has offended the community much more than one artist and his exhibit ever could. Part of his job is to protect the right of Clarksville citizens to experience the arts. He abdicated that responsibility by choosing to exercise censorship over this exhibit. As such he should step down from his post.

Call the museum and tell them that you oppose their actions on this matter and that they should restore the exhibit in full. You might also consider letting them know that if they do not reverse this rash decision then you will consider terminating all support you give their organization.

Phone Numbers:

Voice:  (931) 648-5780
FAX: (931) 553-5179
TTY: (931) 553-5101

E-mail:

Mailing address:
Customs House Museum
P.O. Box 383
Clarksville, TN 37041-0383.